Across the Province

made possible with the generous support of

The Killy Foundation

Across the Province is the Vancouver Art Gallery’s provincial touring program, which circulates exhibitions drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection to partner institutions throughout British Columbia. Partners include: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Evergreen Cultural Centre, Coquitlam; Kamloops Art Gallery; Kelowna Art Gallery; Surrey Art Gallery; The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford; and Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George.

Unreal

Since the origins of Surrealism in the 1920s, the tension between the recognizable and the unfamiliar has inspired and informed artistic practices. Unreal, drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection, considers contemporary artists’ explorations beyond the rational and looks at the ways in which they delve into ideas around desire, fantasy, anxiety and the absurd. Although many of the images and objects presented may initially appear normal and familiar, upon closer examination these quotidian scenes have been transformed into strange, mysterious and at times nightmarish depictions.

From examinations of human vulnerability to the mining of the unconscious as a source of inspiration, to a conscious turn towards the strange and fantastic as a deliberate strategy to counter the cool rationality of conceptual art, this exhibition considers the diversity and innovation with which artists explore the many edges of reality. Artists include Francis Bacon, Maxwell Bates, Marcel Dzama, Jock Macdonald, Eric Metcalfe, Al Neil and Cindy Sherman, among many others.

Evergreen Cultural Centre, Coquitlam
September 12 - November 7, 2013

Kelowna Art Gallery
January 11 - March 9, 2014

Kamloops Art Gallery
April 5 - June 14, 2014

Unreal is organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Daina Augaitis, Chief Curator/Associate Director.

National/International

The Vancouver Art Gallery presents approximately 15 temporary exhibitions annually, from which it selects major in-house curated exhibitions to travel to museums and galleries across Canada and around the world.

BEAT NATION: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture

Beat Nation explores the connections between Aboriginal cultures, hip hop and art. The exhibition brings together 28 artists from across the continent—from the West Coast, as far north as Alaska and Nunavut, as far east as Labrador and as far south as New Mexico. The artists mix together forms of urban youth culture with Aboriginal identity, borrowing from music, street culture and Aboriginal traditions to create innovative and unexpected new works—in painting, sculpture, installation, performance and video—that reflect the current realities of Aboriginal peoples today.

As Aboriginal identities and cultures continue to shift and change, and as artists reinvent older traditions into new forms of expression, their commitment to politics, to storytelling, to Aboriginal languages, to the land and rights remains constant, whether these are stated with drums skins or turntables, natural pigments or spray paint, ceremonial dancing or break dancing.

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto
December 15, 2012 – May 5, 2013

Kamloops Art Gallery
June 29 – September 7, 2013
Made possible with the generous support of The Killy Foundation

Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
October 10, 2013 – January 2, 2014

Dalhousie Art Gallery and St. Mary’s University Art Gallery, Halifax
March 22 – May 18, 2014

Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina
July 5 – September 7, 2014

Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture is organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery and based on an initiative of grunt gallery. Beat Nation is co-curated by Kathleen Ritter, Associate Curator (former), Vancouver Art Gallery and Tania Willard, a Secwepemc artist, designer and curator. This exhibition was made possible with the generous support of Mark McCain & Caro MacDonald/ Eye and I, Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, Gary R. Bell and Rick Erickson & Donna Partridge.

To learn more about our available touring exhibitions, please contact curatorial@vanartgallery.bc.ca